Blasts from the past … Gil Jordan (right), on the cover of 10,000 Years in Hell.
Illustration: Fantagraphics

In Belgium and France, Maurice Tillieux is as lauded as Asterix creator René Goscinny. You’ve likely never heard of him. But Gil Jordan – Tillieux’s signature creation – may be the comic world’s greatest detective (sorry Batman). While Asterix made his English debut in the late 1960s – a mere decade after the diminutive Gaul was created – it wasn’t until 2011 that English-language readers got two Gil Jordan mysteries, both of which, by then, were more than half a century old. This month, Anglophones are getting two more; that’s (slow) progress.

Born in 1921, Tillieux grew up in Belgium loving cinema, slapstick comedy and crime fiction. Despite having his illustrations published in Le Moustique magazine in his mid-teens, he wanted to join the merchant navy. His naval career was halted before it even began, however, when he went into hiding during the second world war. He spent his days writing and drawing, separately, until he united his talents, feeling he could capture mood better using both. The fact that producing comics paid better than writing novels didn’t hurt, either.

The two big comics in Belgium at the time were Tintin and Spirou, and it was while working for the latter during the mid-50s that Tillieux created Gil Jordan. The bow-tied sleuthis reminiscent of how a child might imagine a detective: cool, smart, agile, with an ambiguous age and penchant for car chases. Jordan doesn’t wisecrack; the quips and puns are left to his bumbling sidekick Crackerjack, just one of Jordan’s extended entourage which includes a well-meaning police inspector and an “ultra-competent” secretary. So far, so Tintin: Jordan even looks like his coiffed precursor doing a Philip Marlowe impression.

What the Dickens … panel from Boom and Bust. Illustration: Fantagraphics

But Jordan’s world is very different. Tillieux took Hergé’s “clear line” drawing style and muddied it; where Tintin’s world is clean and sparse, Jordan’s is grimy and littered. The same can be said for the storytelling. Whilst critics adore Tintin for its conceptual complexities, Hergé’s stories are often straightforward adventures peppered with throwaway gags. But for Tillieux, gags have consequences: what you might think is a joke will turn out to be a crucial plot point. Tillieux took familiar comic tropes – then complicated them.

Where Tillieux and Hergé do meet is in their presentation of race. Although never as extreme as Tintin’s worst excesses, Tillieux drifts towards the wrong side of caricature. Even his attempts to attack racism end up a little confused. Boom and Bust, for instance, opens with a car crash where a bystander claims the people involved were “drunk as Poles”. An imposing man behind him exclaims: “My name’s Sfrkvsrscky! Say that again!”Tillieux seems to be simultaneously condemning the bystander’s racist remark and stereotyping Poles. It’s a reminder that this otherwise timeless comic is from the early 60s.

Madcap … a panel from 10,000 Years in Hell. Illustration: Fantagraphics

So why do we all know Tintin and Asterix, but not Gil Jordan? The economics of translating prose – paying for rights, then a translator – rarely work in its favour; with comics, where the translation must also fit in speech bubbles, it is even trickier. Not to mention that the physical size of Franco-Belgian comics (they have similar dimensions to A4 paper) are different to that of other countries, meaning even more work can be required. You need a good reason to bother translating a comic – comics journalist Paul Gravett speculates that the Reverend Marcus Morris, who owned British comic the Eagle, imported Tintin for ideological reasons (Tintin started in a Catholic newspaper). In comparison, Gil Jordan was only translated into English 50 years later because of an editor called Kim Thompson, who had no particular agenda other than loving what he called an “ultraclassic”. Thompson’s death in 2013 is partly why it’s taken so long for this new volume to be released.

It’s a sad moment when you run out of Tintin, and another when you finish Goscinny’s Asterix stories. Now there will be a third tragedy: when you run out of Gil Jordan. Kim Thompson had hoped to release more of the 16 Gil Jordan mysteries. Given the amount of time it’s taken to get just four, perhaps instead of sadness, we’ll have anticipation – at least for a while.